NHK cracks Ultra-HDTV transmission

Japan’s public broadcaster NHK says it has a solution for encoding its 8K ‘Super Hi-Vision’ transmissions. Working with Mitsubishi Electric, NHK says the pair has jointly developed the world’s first rack-mounted High Efficiency Video Codec (HEVC) encoder and decoder for 8K transmission.

HEVC itself is well on its way to being a fixed standard for the broadcasting industry, but what NHK and Mitsubishi have done is to split the image into 17 horizontal rows or bands of image content (each measuring 7680 x 256 pixels) and these 17 rows are then simultaneously encoded in real time, and using what is likely to be another industry standard (for 4K television as well as 8K) of 120 frames/second.

NHK says it will be demonstrating the equipment at its upcoming ‘open house’ showcase at NHK’s R&D headquarters on May 30th – June 2nd in Tokyo.